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THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 5, 2016
ANNALS OF LAW
TAKING TROLLS TO COURT
Carrie Goldberg, a Brooklyn attorney, is helping women who are victims of "revenge porn" and other online assaults.
BY MARGARET TALBOT
O March, in a
courtroom in Newark, New Jer-
sey, a young woman named
Norma attended the sentencing of a for-
mer boyfriend, who had gone to gro-
tesque lengths to humiliate her online.
Four years earlier, when she was seven-
teen, she had met Christopher Morcos,
who was then nineteen, at a Starbucks
near her home, in Nutley. He was a busi-
ness student at a local college, and Norma,
who is soft-spoken, liked that he was
outgoing. He was her first boyfriend, and
they dated for two years. Like a lot of
young men these days, he asked Norma
to send him explicit selfies, and, like a
lot of young women, she did. She made
him promise that he would keep the pic-
tures to himself. He assured her that he
had hidden them on an app with a se-
cure password, and that in any case he
would never circulate them. Once in a
while, however, he made a joke about
doing just that. Norma, a student at the
Fashion Institute of Technology who
lives with her parents, never laughed in
response; she warned him that if he did
she'd take him to court.
In November, , Norma broke up
with Morcos. He barraged her with texts,
sometimes telling her that she needed
to talk to him because his mother was
deathly ill. (This was a lie.) Other texts
threatened to post online her intimate
photographs. A few months later, Norma
received a text message from a stranger,
who said that he'd seen her page on Porn-
Hub, one of the most popular X-rated
sites. She called her boss at the clothing
store where she worked and said that she
was going to be late that afternoon.Then
she frantically began searching the In-
ternet. Eventually, she found eight pho-
tographs that she'd given to her boy-
friend, on a page that identified her by
her first and last names. Norma told me,
"It was basically soliciting people to con-
tact me for oral sex. It had my phone
number---that's how that stranger had
found me. It had my street name. My
town was there. It said, 'Find me on Face-
book.' My bra size was there. And then
the photos."
Norma initiated a criminal case against
Morcos, and he was charged with inva-
sion of privacy in the third degree, in ac-
cordance with a statute that is popularly
known as a "revenge porn" law. In ,
New Jersey passed the nation's first such
legislation. The statute makes it a crime
for a person who knows "that he is not
licensed or privileged to do so" to none-
theless disclose "any photograph, film,
videotape, recording or any other repro-
duction of the image of another person
whose intimate parts are exposed or who
is engaged in an act of sexual penetra-
tion or sexual contact, unless that per-
son has consented to such disclosure."
The preferred term for such statutes
is "nonconsensual-porn laws," because
the online harassment does not always
involve a spurned ex like Morcos. Some-
times people hack into a celebrity's iCloud
or Gmail account to steal intimate pic-
tures that can be sold and posted online.
In , Jennifer Lawrence and other
prominent actresses were victims of such
thefts; Lawrence told Vanity Fair that
the incident was a "sex crime." Last
month, a Pennsylvania judge sentenced
one of the men who hacked the images,
Ryan Collins, to eighteen months in jail.
Celebrities are not the only people tar-
geted. A recent Brookings Institution
report examined nearly eighty cases of
"sextortion," involving three thousand
victims. In one such case, a Californian
named Luis Mijangos tricked women
into installing malware that searched
their computers for sexually explicit pho-
tographs and switched on Webcams and
computer microphones, allowing him to
record the women undressing or having
sex. He then threatened to release the
resulting photographs or videos if the
women didn't make pornographic vid-
eos for him. In , Mijangos was con-
victed of computer hacking and wire-
tapping, for which he is serving a six-year
sentence.
Sometimes people surreptitiously film
consensual sex acts, or even rapes, and
make the footage public for reasons other
than revenge. In April, Marina Lonina,
an eighteen-year-old Ohio woman, was
charged with live-streaming, on the Peri-
scope app, the rape of a seventeen-year-old
friend by a man they'd met at a nearby
mall. Lonina and her lawyer said that
she was trying to gather evidence by film-
ing it. But, according to the prosecutor,
she soon got caught up in the stream of
"like"s from viewers. Lonina has been
charged with rape, kidnapping, sexual
battery, and pandering sexual matter in-
volving a minor.
In the past decade, thirty-three more
states and the District of Columbia
have adopted nonconsensual-porn laws
like New Jersey's. Despite such e orts,
one can easily find sites on the Internet
that are dedicated to revenge porn. On
myex.com, people post naked pictures of
former spouses or lovers---mostly women,
some men---along with their names,
ages, and home towns. They add cruel
captions: "My slut wife"; "Chubby frigid
slut." Posts about men frequently sug-
gest that their penis is too small.
Prosecutions of individuals receive
considerable media attention, in part be-
cause they are unusual. Pennsylvania has
undertaken a dozen or so prosecutions---
the most of any state. Other states with
nonconsensual-porn laws have had just
one or two cases make it to court. Vic-
tims are often reluctant, or ashamed, to
come forward; police o cers are some-
times unfamiliar with the new laws, or
are unsure how to conduct the computer
forensics needed to build a case.
Norma's complaint would almost
certainly not have proceeded to court
had she not been represented by Carrie
Goldberg, who was sitting in the court-
room next to her that day. Goldberg is